Forum Moderators: phranque
I bought the domain from them so i believe they hold both accounts.
This is a good time to remind others what a bad idea it is to register domains through your web hosting provider!
This is a textbook example of why that is a bad idea.
You need to determine several things:
1. Who is the domain registrant? Do you even own the domain you think you own? Use "whois" to look-up your domain. What is the name that is listed as registrant?
2. If you registered your domain through your hosting provider, are they a registrar, or just a reseller?
whois will tell you this as well. Who is the registrar? Is it your hosting provider, or is it somebody else?
If it is somebody else, your hosting provider is a reseller. Contact the registrar - by phone, immediately - and tell them that you registered a domain through a reseller, and the reseller is unresponsive.
This is a good time to remind others what a bad idea it is to register domains through your web hosting provider!
There is only one case you should avoid. Avoid all domain name registration services that register themselves to be the registrant of your domain name! If you check the whois record of your domain and under the administrative contact details its your name, address, and email, then everything is ok.
There is nothing wrong if your web hosting provider is also your domain registrar or vice versa. There is nothing wrong if your domain registrar is a reseller too.
I disagree.
You are correct, if you are using a top-tier hosting company.
What if you somehow wind-up with a fly-by-night hosting company? You wind up in the situation the poster is in.
A top-tier registrar has never failed. (Business-wise, though there have been sporadic incidences of technical failure - inability to register, inability to make changes - for brief periods.)
Smaller registrars HAVE gone out of business, leaving customers in the lurch for some time. Resellers and web hosts go out of business or drop off the edge of the world on a daily basis. Do a search, and you can read about it here on WebmasterWorld.
Sure, as long as the domain in in their name, they will eventually be able to sort it out. But how long is "eventually"?
It's pretty easy to pick a top-tier registrar that is unlikely to go out of business. And it's an easy decision to make - theres's a small range of registration fees, so cost really doesn't come to bear.
You are best protected by separating this three ways: registrar, DNS provider, web hosting provider. If any one (or even in some cases, two) of these goes out of business, or becomes flakey, you are covered:
1. If a registrar goes out of business, this has only a short-term effect. (Short term here meaning weeks to months.) Your records are held by the REGISTRY (.com, .net, etc.) not by the registrar. So, your domain will continue to function. However, if a registrar goes out of business, you may not be able to CHANGE anything (including your nameserver pointers) until the mess has been straightened out. Registrars HAVE gone out of business, and this situation (customers stuck, unable to change nameservers) HAS occured. So, DO NOT HOST DNS AT YOUR REGISTRAR! If you host DNS elsewhere, at least you will be able to change your DNS records. (Though you are stuck with your DNS provider until the registrar mess is resolved.)
2. If your DNS provider goes out of business, or is flakey, you can arrange new service and change the nameserver pointers at the registrar.
3. If your web host goes out of business, or is flakey, you can arrange new service and change your DNS records at your DNS provider.
In general, it would be wise to make sure that your DNS provider is more reliable than your web host, and your registrar more reliable than your DNS provider. Fortuantely, that is not an expensive undertaking - just one that takes a bit of thought and planning.
Do that, and you can kanoodle with flakey, fly-by-night web hosting companies, if that is your choice. :)
Earlier this year I moved a much bigger and important site from the same above mentioned host...This site virtually dominated yahoo and msn for our many keywords and was coming up nicely on google.
However, as soon as we switched host we disapeared from all search engines for months...it was a disaster. It took google ages to reindex our pages...now we are back on top at yahoo...not showing well on msn and on google...well they have finally, recently indexed 1000's of pages..but it was a set back of about 4 months.
Does anyone know why this might happen and if or how we can avoid it happening again when we move the other site...thanks
Earlier this year I moved a much bigger and important site from the same above mentioned host...However, as soon as we switched host we disapeared from all search engines for months...it was a disaster. It took google ages to reindex our pages...
Does anyone know why this might happen and if or how we can avoid it happening again when we move the other site...
This shouldn't happen. Your host should have nothing to do with your search engine rankings. Of course, you kept the same domain name, right?
Switching from one hosting provider to another though, often means changing software, changing configurations, etc. It isn't often that you can just pick up all the files and drop them on a new host and it all works.
I'd look to see what else changed. For example, had you been using 301 redirects to direct non-www to www or vice-versa, and forgot to do that on the new host?
Did you maintain the same URL structure on your site, or did you take the move as an opportunity to "clean things up" (and forget to put in redirects from the old locations?)
A gap in connectivity could be harmful. Did you "go off the air" for an extended period? Obviously, you risk that now by STAYING with your flakey, non-responsive host.
my new host who is also a friend and my new webmaster
